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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Tommy's Take on Capes, Cowls & Villains Foul

I've reviewed a couple of Spectrum Games’ releases in the
past, so I thought I’d take a look at their first foray into supers gaming with
Capes, Cowls & Villains Foul.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Spectrum Games takes genre emulation
very seriously, with Slasher Flick being the prime example, although Cartoon Action Hour Season 2 is nothing to sneeze at. At the time of this writing, the
PDF is $13.99 for 163 pages in full color, or in softcover Print on Demand for $31.99. Disappointingly, there are no
bookmarks or clickable links, two things I’ve come to love about PDFs.

The guts of Cartoon Action Hour live on inside CC&VF,
with the game using all d12s, player-defined Traits, Factoids and so on. Damage
is handled with Setback Tokens, not unlike Stress in other
slightly-less-traditional RPGs, except all types of Setbacks are calculated
together…there is no tracking of Physical Stress, Mental Stress, etc.

Character creation is point based, with three scales given: 100
pts (for Street Level or rookie characters), 150 (default) and 200 (The Big
Guns). Traits, as noted, are player-defined, and you are assumed to wind up
with 5-12 of them. Traits are rated as Human (1-4), Superhuman (5-8) and Cosmic
(9+). Human Traits might be stuff like DETECTIVE. Superhuman might be
TIME-SHIFTING while Cosmic might be GOD OF WAR. Traits wear down as you use
them in a scene, and you can further define them with Bonuses and Restrictions.
Some examples include Auto-Defend (one free use per Issue for defense), Hint
(very GM-heavy Bonus, allowing for “hunches” or psychic flashes), Linked
(allowing you to use multiple Traits to boost a roll), or Situational (where
Traits get better in specific situations). Restrictions include Editorial
Choice (where you must spend Editorial Control to use it), Not-A-Finisher
(cannot end a fight), Definitive (it always works in a certain way, and there
is an associated drawback to that), and Shared Trait (like a headquarters or
AVENGERS ASSEMBLE! or something). A cheat sheet of modifiers is provided, as is
a series of example traits and how they are built (like making duplicates of
yourself, mind control or even sidekicks). There’s also a big list of example
traits of various types like Professional Traits (Detective, Investigative
Reporter), Genre Traits (Breaks the Fourth Wall, Revealing Costume), Equipment
Traits and so on. Examples are ALWAYS good in player-defined Trait systems and
they don’t skimp here.

PCs have Editorial Control, which are essentially plot
points. You can spend them to re-roll dice, avoid knockouts, save innocents or
pull off random twists…and if you want REALLY random twists, there’s a chart
you can roll on giving you effects like interrupting combat (giving you a free
action and then restarting initiative), Great Shot (giving you an attack modifier),
Sacrifice (giving you a bonus to a Trait roll to help someone else), a surprise
cameo and more.

Complications give you points of Editorial Control when
activated, while Factoids just further round out your character (like your
shrinking, leaping, super-strong robot EATS LOTS OF POTATO CHIPS, for
instance).

A character creation example is included, as well as Plug
and Play Templates for various power levels, and a slew of heroes and villains
(like Americana, Boy Frog and Death Stalker or Dead Eye, Death Star and The Rat
King).

The basic mechanic is simple: Roll a d12, add a Trait, beat
a target number. If you have Linked Traits, your bonus is higher. If you have
Benefit dice, you roll multiple d12s and take the best result. If you have
Detriment dice, you roll multiple d12s and take the lowest result. If you roll
a 1, that’s a fumble. If you roll a 12, double the value of the Primary Trait
before adding the die and modifiers. If you fail a roll by more than your
Threshold (based off of your starting Editorial Control), then you take a Big
Hit and are knocked out.

Initiative is free-flowing. Essentially, when combat begins
the Editor (GM) decides who goes first. After they act, they pick who goes next
and so on and so on, but everybody has to get a turn before anybody else gets a
turn. Advice is given for adjudicating the rules in situations (like when a player
insists on using a Trait that may not be appropriate for an action), as well as
gang piling, combos, or Pushing (taking Setback token to roll more dice…that
stick with the result, rather than just having you pick the higher one).

Villains get their own chapter, and scale depending on
whether they are working solo or in a team. Think about how Spidey can be
pushed to the limit by each member of the Sinister Six individually, but still
not be overwhelmed by them attacking him at once. Villains also get to spend
Editorial Control on things like Escapes, Big Speeches (which will either
demoralize the heroes or give away crucial plans), setting off big explosions
or even pulling the “It was really a Doombot all along!” bit. There’s even a
section on shorthanding the random villains that get used to fill out the
Masters of Evil or the Taskmaster’s lackeys in a pinch.

Optional Rules include Zero Level Traits (letting you make a
straight die roll without modifiers for something that everyone would have on
some level), a suggestion on cheating the die rolls for NPCs (starting off by
roll 2d12 and taking the highest, and shifting to taking the lowest near the
climax of the adventure), shifting Auto-Defend to once per scene (instead of
issue), mixing and matching heroes of different point totals (this equals more
Editorial Control for the lower total characters), and playing “Heroes in
Training” games where you build the “end result” heroes and shave points off to
get the “rookie” version. There’s also rules for Killing Damage, LARPing and
Experience Points/Upgrades/Overhauling characters.

An extensive example of play is provided (complete with PCs
of differing point totals in order to show those rules off).

The Issues chapter offers some general GMing advice, as well
as a pair of pretty-well-ready-to-run Issues featuring villains from earlier in
the book.

The book ends with a character sheet, glossary, summary
charts and index.

WHAT WORKS: Tons of examples. Simple system, with the
Setback Tokens being among my favorite “non-Hit Point” damage systems I’ve seen
(with the word Stress just stressing me out). CC&VF seems to have taken a
lot of ideas from other games but implemented them well. Oh, and I loved the
random twists. The system is very flexible without being completely hand-wavey.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: Very few of the example characters
terribly inspired me. Many of the optional rules (like the templates or
building heroes in advance and working up to them) don’t do a thing for me…but
they are optional. There are big chunks of the system that are open to
player-GM negotiation, which can go bad in the wrong hands.

CONCLUSION: While many of the support pieces did little to
inspire me, the core seems very flexible and very sound. With large parts of
the system open to such interpretation, certain types of players can make for
nightmarish sessions, just like certain kinds of GMs can, but that’s true of
any system (and especially Supers systems, which require a certain amount of
buy-in from all parties above and beyond most genres). Unlike some other recent
entrants into the supers RPG realm, I feel confident that I have a good/decent
grasp of the mechanics right away, but I suppose I would have actually
preferred the “serial numbers filed off” approach to the sample characters,
rather than the characters used, because generic versions of Thor, Flash,
Batman, Silver Surfer, Captain America, Wolverine and Superman are more useful
for me in pinning down the important bits of the system. Does CC&VF hit
some magic area that no other supers game ever has? Not for me, not really. “Hawkeye
fighting alongside Thor” has been built into more and more games over the
years, with BASH and ICONS even handling it in largely the same way. Does that
make CC&VF a bad game? Heck no. If anything, I'd call it the more "traditional" alternative to Marvel Heroic. I intend to play around with the character
creation to see how well it models certain characters of mine, but I’d be
inclined to put it near the top of my Supers options right now, if not at the very
top.